That prayer you have framed in your dining room, that list of petitions you recite every Sunday or hopefully every morning, that seemingly gentle gift given by your imagined calm Buddha lord, is a conspirator’s plea. Be careful.

Someone might hear you! God might hear you. You might hear you. Calling God Father as if you are speaking to the mysterious One, philosophy’s unanswerable problem. Do you know Him? He knows who you are? You, you oi polloi bastard creature? Do you claim to be His child? 

What do you ask? That His kingdom comes. Don’t let all the other kings hear that. Don’t let your political gods get this report. They don’t like usurpers. Neither does your little ego. Do you know what you are saying? If God’s kingdom comes, it swallows up everything, including you. You can’t sit on your throne with Him in the room. If He reigns, then you don’t. Or did you think His reign agrees with yours? If it does, then He can’t be God. 

Oh, His reign has begun. The King has already landed on this wasteland, slipping quietly among the sinners, the beggars, the lame, and the disempowered. A poor baby cries. A mother rides among the masses to Bethlehem. A naked, beaten man shouts, “It is finished,” foolishly between two ordinary rabble-rousers. No one in Bangladesh heard it then, but fools have carried its reverberation across oceans like the ripples of a pebble in a lake. It’s even reached your ears, and you say it when you suffer, when you feel the guilt of suffering others, when you close your eyes at night and before the grave. 

Thy Kingdom come. It’s too late. It has already begun. You’re caught up in it. Guilty conspirator before the world. So why pray this? Because your little kingdom needs toppling every day. Your spirit’s free, but your flesh is weak. And your money is often on the wrong horse. 

So pray it today if you dare. Claim the gifts of the Kingdom: daily bread, forgiveness, protection from temptation, and deliverance from the evil one. What a beautiful reign and gracious God—the killer of gods and redeemer of slaves. 

God’s Kingdom has come, is coming, til the lost are found, the blind shall see, the deaf shall hear, the dead shall rise. 

Thy Kingdom come.